


Feast

by gaygreaser



Category: The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
Genre: Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Character Death, Character Study, Feelings, Grief/Mourning, M/M, POV Second Person, Rambling, Relationship Study, i finished this book a couple weeks ago and im still refusing to get over it, i...dont know what this is i just wanted to write
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:02:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23741260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaygreaser/pseuds/gaygreaser
Summary: Achilles reflects on life without Patroclus.
Relationships: Achilles/Patroclus (Song of Achilles)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 124





	Feast

You are made of metal armour and unstoppable spears, the human compassion that temporarily possesses you always giving in to murderous instincts. You are a warrior, untouchable, invulnerable, but when your gaze settles on his unseeing eyes and his still body, you crumble into nothing.

You tear the world apart with your bare hands, weeping when you are alone and screaming when others dare approach you, breaking every single material thing in your tent that takes up too much of the empty space, that reminds you of your isolation. You shout at women who claim that they loved him the way you did, at your own mother when she tries to insinuate that his life is not worth your unending pain.

You hold him morning and night, treating his body like a temple as you tried to when he was alive, but you know that the girl is right: you did not treasure him the way he deserved to be treasured, like how soldiers treasure their greatest possessions, gold and diamond, though he was never a possession. He was light and hope and a symbol of eventual satisfaction in life, an inevitable  _ happily-ever-after _ .

So you try to make up for it now, hoping and praying that his spirit can see you as you stroke his hair back, sit down for dinner with his body propped up on the chair opposite, and you hope that he does not think you a mad-man.

You are, though, for you have led your life into insanity. Two rotting bodies reside in your suffocatingly large tent: the love of your life and the man who took his. You drag the murderer’s body around the city mockingly. Perhaps some see it as you flaunting your strength, your skill, and it fills them with discomfort--arrogance is never respected amongst such humble men.

They do not understand that it is not arrogance at all, but a way for you to try and fill the increasing void in your heart, to show the man you killed as much disrespect as humanly possible with the hopes that it humiliates his spirit, forces him to see how much pain he has inflicted. What he has broken in his petty murder.

While before, you cared so much for your own life, kicked every obstacle out of the way in an attempt to preserve it, now everything feels worthless, for you hardly remember a time without him.

And so your life is nothing without him; nothing at all.

You have become so used to throwing spears and driving swords into hearts that you had forgotten that the soldiers whose lives you take are people whose families likely grieved the way you grieve now, but he never forgot. He cared for everything, for everyone.

You only ever cared for him, but that didn’t stop you from being selfish. You neglected him in your useless quest for glory.

You have had to cover up his body now because the stench of his decay gets worse and worse, but you still take him into your bed when night falls. Otherwise, you cannot sleep. Having his body beside you leads to nightmares, but none worse than the reality.

You do not fear death; you desperately wish, with every day that slowly passes, for Death to come and claim you as the prophecy had said it would.

You are frustrated at the Fates for not providing you with any help, for refusing to teach you how to die when you have spent your whole life learning how to live.

You crave his touch most when the sun rises. You remember spending so many early mornings wrapped in his embrace, pushing his flat dark hair away from his face to acquire a more complete view of his bright, kind eyes.

You kissed him fiercely, with an urgency, fearing ever losing him, but reassuring yourself that with you by his side, he was equally invulnerable.

Until your pride let him go. You let him go. You were not with him when he died. He would not have died, had you been with him.

This knowledge makes you entirely inconsolable; you don’t know what to do, what to say, how to live, how to die.

You loved him, you love him so dearly, it feels as if the universe has lost an essential piece of its unsolvable puzzle. You think of the thousands of lives you have ended, and it stirs only the barest trace of emotion in your seemingly soulless heart. Then you think of him, how your pride and his virtue ended his, and everything crashes around you, a tsunami of regret and pain and anger at your twisted priorities.

You let his body go only when you realise that you have been ruining his chances at happiness in the underworld. You will not let your selfishness win again, not when the stakes are as heartbreakingly high as they are. He does not deserve to spend eternity in limbo.

You tell them that you demand to be buried with him, for your ashes to be mixed together, for your gravestone to include his name alongside yours. You know how highly you are regarded by all, how flat his generosity falls in comparison, but you have never regarded him as an inferior. Between you and him, he was far better. Best of Greeks. Best of men.

Surrendering his body to the licking flames of ravenous fire means that your tent has become emptier than it has been ever before. You even returned the body of your lover’s murderer to his father; you are not cruel enough to refuse a man peace in the afterlife. You want to be kind, to be gracious, to be understanding; being in love with the living embodiment of good inspires you infinitely.

You continue to seek death at day time and you continue to cry into your pillow at night, muffling your tears. Sometimes, the girl who thinks that she was in love with him the way you were, whose name you forget now, too overwhelmed by sorrow to remember your own name sometimes, comes to peek into your tent. You always pretend that you do not see her; she always starts to say something but stops herself. She pretends not to see your red eyes, your torn and filthy clothes, your vacant expression.

You begin to live life through your steadily growing imagination. You fantasise that he is with you in everything you do. When you are walking up to your challengers, ready to fight and hopefully lose your life in the process, you imagine him standing a few feet away, eyes shining, not at your cold-blooded murder but at your constant elegance. He had never stopped thinking you were magical. You had never stopped yearning for glory, desperate to attain it and share it with him. No one was more worthy of your metaphorical throne. He was the real magic.

At night, it comforts you to clutch your pillow, pretending that you are pressing your head against his hard chest, but your pillow cannot wrap muscled, loving arms around you as he did. It cannot grip your hair, primal desire rendering its breath shallow. It does not touch you like he did, exploring the hidden-away parts of your body and of your mind.

His phantom accompanies you even in your dreams, where your mind takes you back to Chiron’s cave and you envision hunting, swimming, climbing, your love never leaving your side.

Your imagination extends to conversations with others. When you engage in the idle chatter of fatigued soldiers, you imagine that he is beside you, eyes sparkling at your wit, at your mischievous smile, watching and waiting.

You have to stop yourself from talking to him a few times when others are around, but you think Odysseus catches you once; you see surprise and sympathy flash momentarily on his face before it neutralises. You are glad that he says nothing. You cannot endure people’s pity.

When Paris’ arrow finally lands in your back, sending you face first into the merciful Earth, your instinct is to smile. You dream, joyfully, of being finally reunited with him in Elysium. Yet he, standing right next to you in your imagination, is horrified, face crumpling with grief, likely mourning that you will never again provide the planet with your endless light.

You know better; your light disappeared when he did. Or maybe even before--maybe it disappeared when you prioritised your pride and arbitrary fame over ensuring his safety, his life.

So you smile, and then you die.

Fuck the Greeks and Troy and war and winning. Your soul will become one with his, and you will spend eternity in the arms of his beautiful spirit. He will pour his light, his sunshine, his loveliness into you, and you will let him. You will be a slave to him, never straying. He will live as a king should, feasting nightly on your adoration.

You will be famous on Earth, but your long-standing dream feels whimsical, far-away. It seems a distant fairytale. While once, it was all you cared about, now it falls flat. An amusingly shallow dream.

You could have lived a happy life. Forgotten by history, but happy, ruling a small kingdom with him at your dinner table, on your throne, in your bed. Even as you long for this simple life, you realise that it would have never satisfied you. You hungered, always, for glory, from the moment you lay your hands on a spear until the moment you set your eyes on his irretrievably lifeless body.

As your last few breaths fall from your body like a sigh, you conclude that glory is nothing if you are not alive to bask in it, if he is not there by your side to award your heroism with a hundred thousand kisses.

Now and for eternity, you hunger for him, only for him.

**Author's Note:**

> eternity  
> /ɪˈtəːnɪti,iːˈtəːnɪti/  
> noun  
> infinite or unending time.  
> "their love was sealed for eternity"


End file.
